2013: A Good Year For Open-Source AMD?

[curaga]

How much secret sauce can there be in a "turn it off" command to UVD?

[bridgman]

How much secret sauce can there be in a "turn it off" command to UVD?

Don't think we were talking about turning UVD off -- I was talking about decoding video with it.

[DanL]

I brought that same thing up a few months ago, but I don't think Michael cares about people breaking the forum rules.

Actually, it was brought up years ago: http://phoronix.com/forums/showthrea...3-Ban-Qaridium
Watching him debate with bridgman and display mastery of the below techniques is entertaining once you get used to it. Q is just a part of the Phoronix scenery, like the beer references that some people can't stand.

Does every fcking thread have to end like this? Guys there is a function called "Ignore List". Use it!

Ignore List doesn't really work for more advanced trolls, especially those who post at the rate of Q and are skilled at threadjacking.

The Contrarian Troll. A sophisticated breed, Contrarian Trolls frequent boards whose predominant opinions are contrary to their own. It is important to distinguish between dissenters and actual Contrarian Trolls, however; the Contrarian is not categorized as a troll because of his or her dissenting opinions, but due to the manner in which he or she behaves:

? Contrarian Warning Sign Number One: The most important indicator of a poster's Contrarian Troll status is his constant use of subtle and not-so-subtle insults, a technique intended to make people angry. Contrarians will resist the urge to be insulting at first, but as their post count increases, they become more and more abusive of those with whom they disagree. Most often they initiate the insults in the course of what has been a civil, if heated, debate to that point.

? Contrarian Warning Sign Number Two: Constant references to the forum membership as monolithic. "You guys are all just [descriptor]." "You're a lynch mob." "You all just want to ridicule anyone who disagrees with you."

? Contrarian Warning Sign Number Three: Intellectual dishonesty. This is only a mild indicator that is not limited to trolls, but Contrarians display it to a high degree. They will lie about things they've said, pull posts out of context in a manner that changes their meanings significantly, and generally ignore any points for which they have no ready answers.

? Contrarian Warning Sign Number Four: Accusing the accusers. When confronted with their trolling, trolls immediately respond that it is the accusers who are trolls. Often the Contrarian will single out his most vocal opponent and claim that while he can respect his other opponents, this one in particular is beneath his notice.

? Contrarian Warning Sign Number Five: Attempts to condescend. The Contrarian will seek refuge in condescending remarks that repeatedly scorn his or her critics as beneath notice ? all the while continuing to respond to them.

? Contrarian Warning Sign Number Six: One distinctive mark of Contrarian Trolls is that every thread in which they dissent quickly devolves into a debate about who is trolling whom. In the course of such a debate the Contrarian will display many of the other Warning Signs mentioned above.

[entropy]

Nope. Same goes for all of the programming info... the best we can do is give rough estimates and confidence levels in cases where we have a specific list of tasks to complete before we can release, but this is more like UVD where we don't know what the outcome will be until the last minute.

As soon as we get to the point where the remaining issues can be discussed in public, we release

Thanks for answering.

Btw, IIRC, you stated some years ago that R&D is trying to disentangle the problematic parts (DRM, etc.) as much as possible from the rest of the ASIC,
but it will take some generations to take off. Is this something we will profit soon or has this strategy been dropped?

[bridgman]

Btw, IIRC, you stated some years ago that R&D is trying to disentangle the problematic parts (DRM, etc.) as much as possible from the rest of the ASIC, but it will take some generations to take off. Is this something we will profit soon or has this strategy been dropped?

The strategy has not been dropped, but the HW development pipe is pretty long and we're not redesigning blocks *just* for this.

I expect the first change will become visible over the next 12-15 months, although I'm not sure we'll be able to tell you what specific changes we made. If all goes well you will see more HW info released and think "finally, what took them so long ?"

[ChrisXY]

PM basically works by changing clocks and voltages to make power/performance tradeoffs that match the user's needs.

For r600 and earlier the driver code set clocks and voltages directly. On most of the more recent hardware generations the driver can still set clocks and voltages directly but each generation has different hardware blocks added which can set those clocks and voltages automatically with guidance from the driver. So far we have not been allowed to release info for those additional HW blocks, although as with UVD we have been working internally to change that. The difference is that we started internal discussions about PM a couple of years ago, concluded that we were not going to get quick approval, and that's why the current PM code was developed.

I think many people (like me) who say they would like better power management aren't even talking about automatically adjusting power levels to "match the user's needs". It's still that on "low" power level my HD 6550M drains more power than catalyst by default. (Last time I tried "low" it sometimes crashed so I used "mid" since then which seems to be exactly the same but at least appeared to be more stable).

What I personally think should be the priority in power management is bringing the card down to the minimum power drain possible for the "low" profile.

 % sudo su -c "echo low > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_profile"
 % cat /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/radeon_pm_info
default engine clock: 600000 kHz
current engine clock: 299970 kHz
default memory clock: 800000 kHz
current memory clock: 299950 kHz
voltage: 900 mV
PCIE lanes: 16
 % sudo su -c "echo mid > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_profile"
 % cat /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/radeon_pm_info
default engine clock: 600000 kHz
current engine clock: 299970 kHz
default memory clock: 800000 kHz
current memory clock: 299950 kHz
voltage: 900 mV
PCIE lanes: 16

[airlied]

I think many people (like me) who say they would like better power management aren't even talking about automatically adjusting power levels to "match the user's needs". It's still that on "low" power level my HD 6550M drains more power than catalyst by default. (Last time I tried "low" it sometimes crashed so I used "mid" since then which seems to be exactly the same but at least appeared to be more stable).

What I personally think should be the priority in power management is bringing the card down to the minimum power drain possible for the "low" profile.

 % sudo su -c "echo low > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_profile"
 % cat /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/radeon_pm_info
default engine clock: 600000 kHz
current engine clock: 299970 kHz
default memory clock: 800000 kHz
current memory clock: 299950 kHz
voltage: 900 mV
PCIE lanes: 16
 % sudo su -c "echo mid > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_profile"
 % cat /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/radeon_pm_info
default engine clock: 600000 kHz
current engine clock: 299970 kHz
default memory clock: 800000 kHz
current memory clock: 299950 kHz
voltage: 900 mV
PCIE lanes: 16

Yeah I suspect there are block on the gpu that fglrx powers off dynamically to get even lower than the min one.

I'm not sure, if anyone was going to work on power saving I'd recommend the nouveau approach and reverse engineer fglrx rather than talking to AMD, and definitely try not be covered by an NDA.

While improving the current code might be worth it for a while, its suboptimal in the long term, and reverse engineering fglrx would probably produce a much more useful benefit.

Dave.

[89c51]

@bridgman


is there still work being done for the UVD ???

[bridgman]

@bridgman
is there still work being done for the UVD ???

Yes, although we're not at the point where I can say anything more encouraging than before about chances of exposing the HW.

[DanL]

well the clue is to call a opponent with dissenting opinions a "Contrarian Troll" is the first step to be the Contrarian Troll

...

Accusing the accusers. When confronted with their trolling, trolls immediately respond that it is the accusers who are trolls.

You made my day. Thanks.